No room to grieve
A box of feelings I put away, unopened
In August, during the week I waited for an appointment to confirm that I was having my fifth miscarriage, I didn’t let myself grieve.
The time for that will come, I thought. Not yet, I thought. When we know for certain, that’s when I will let this grief in.
Instead, I did my usual work. Cooked our usual meals. I tidied the house. I scrubbed at a stain on the hallway rug, where one of the cats had murdered a bird.
Then, when we did know for certain, it still didn’t feel like the right time yet. We had people coming to stay in a few days. I knew I could have cancelled. I knew they’d understand only too well. But I didn’t want to. Sympathy could wait. Sadness could wait.
Instead, I changed the bedding. Hoovered and stuck some bleach down the loo. Instead, I chose pizza, wine, and enjoying ourselves without the cold hand of other people’s concern on our shoulder.
In the weeks after that, I got up in the mornings. I took Edward to nursery. I went to my usual yoga class. I sent out newsletters. I suppose I could have not done these things, but I couldn’t see the sense in it.
I bought new leggings and a sports bra. I re-downloaded Couch 2 5K. My mum took Edward for a weekend. And, in lieu of feeling any feelings, Dan and I cleared out the garage.
I took on a last-minute commission to help someone out. The journalist who’d originally been assigned the job had had to return it ‘for personal reasons’. I let my own personal reasons interrupt nothing. Even the bleeding stopped in time for the new term’s swimming lessons.
I kept thinking that grief was bound to barge in soon enough: no point in inviting it before I had to. So I visited friends’ new babies. I went to a party. I wasn’t even pasting on a smile, like I have done before: there wasn’t any grief yet to mask.
I started the Christmas shopping. I phoned the GP and told them I wasn’t pregnant any more. I got my hair cut. I got a wax. The beautician asked me if I had children, followed by: ‘Is it just the one you have?’
But still grief felt out of reach.
Then, at some point, it started to feel too late for all that anyway. If I thought about it, I would surely fall apart. And there was no space or time for me to fall apart now. At some point, I started walking around with these sentences forming in my head. And that felt like a good enough substitute.
One day, last week, I cried in the shower. It was as if my body recognised something had to give, but my brain made it pick the least inconvenient moment possible: when my face was already wet.
My showers these days last less than three minutes. Perhaps four minutes if I have to wash my hair. It takes me 11 minutes to drive Edward to nursery. 9 minutes to cook pasta. 4 minutes 30 seconds to do an egg. 49 minutes for one load of laundry. The best part of two hours to write 1,000 words.
I know because I have timed all of these things, for one reason or another. I am always setting myself timers in order to get things done. But I don’t feel I’ve even started the clock on my grief for this sixth – and possibly final – pregnancy.
I told myself that perhaps this week, Baby Loss Awareness Week, would be the right moment. But here it is and I’m still not ready. This year, I’ve come offline because I find I do not want to be sad in public. This is very different to how I’ve felt before; when I needed the depth of my grief for those other pregnancies to be witnessed, understood.
This time, I want to hide it away. I picture it, this theoretical grief, like a golden jar I have placed on a shelf for the time being. It sits next to another box I have put other questions in: Do we try again? Can we try again? Is this it? Or is it worth gambling once more - or however many times it takes - with my body, my sanity?
‘We don’t have to decide anything right now,’ Dan has reminded me, a few times since the miscarriage.
One day, though, both vessels will have to come down from the shelf. We will have to answer the questions in the box, eventually.
Then – and perhaps only then – I will open up the jar containing this grief and see what it is like.
I feel this so much, Jenny! I had an unexpected fifth pregnancy and miscarriage in July, the month after I’d decided to stop fertility treatments and instead take myself on a road trip to Alaska in fulfillment of another dream. I wrote about it on my Substack:
www.lizexplores.com/p/the-end-of-the-road
The emotions around learning I was pregnant again after four losses and three years of trying were complicated by the fact that I had finally started to let go, to make other plans. I knew if I gave up my trip, I would likely lose the pregnancy anyway and have to grieve both of my dreams.
I decided I would still go to Alaska, and I allowed myself to book my first ultrasound in Anchorage and start getting excited. Then the hCG dropped to zero and the bleeding came. I kept packing, and two weeks later I drove myself 5,000 miles to Fairbanks and picked up my husband at the airport for a belated honeymoon. He flew home two weeks later, but I’ve been driving ever since, from the Arctic Circle to the Kenai Peninsula, back through the Yukon and the Alaska panhandle to the Rocky Mountains.
I never made space for my grief. But it erupted one day while listening to an audiobook about a woman’s epic Alaska adventure. Throughout the book she grappled with the decision to have kids or pursue a life of adventure. Then, of course, the epilogue presented her happy ending: “We were hiking with our 10-month-old son…”
I lost it. I turned the book off and didn’t finish. It wasn’t even grief. It was pure rage. Rage that someone else could make such a casual decision and then have a healthy baby boy. I screamed and cried while I was driving (when I called my husband, he wisely suggested I pull over).
My grief had metastasized into anger, and it all erupted in that moment. Then as fast as I could, I bottled it at all back up so I could keep driving.
This is the first I’ve written about that experience, and I’m grateful that you opened up the topic, Jenny, because I can so relate to postponing the grief, especially the fifth time around when you are already numb to the experience.
At this point I don’t know how to process all this grief in a healthy way. I just keep driving, aiming my compass south for Mexico.
I so understand this. After my second miscarriage I was just angry and had no time for the grief. I just wanted to get on with life. Having known the pain of this grief already I didn’t want to endure it again - I wanted to move along to the next stage and keep life ticking over. Same as our failed IVF - I can’t be bothered to keep living the same emotions every time. I want to enjoy live and not be sad all the time! I’m so sorry for your own pain and losses, heartbreaking xxx